Boldness Is Another Word For Temporary Insanity

Damn Facebook and their annoying, personalized, Minority-Report-level-of-creepy pop-up ads. It’s depressing when Facebook reminds you of who you are. It consistently vexes me when an ad pops up for the exact shirt I looked at online yesterday. I want to shout to the heavens…You don’t know me. Yes. Maybe I briefly toyed with the idea of that shirt yesterday. But I am a different person now. Maybe I changed my mind. Maybe I don’t like that shirt anymore. Back off! You don’t know my life! But, alas, they do.

And it is because of Facebook and the existence of profiles and cookies and other Internet hocus pocus that I do not yet fully comprehend that I today impetuously spent $400 and 50,000 frequent flyer miles I’d saved up for years on something that up until the very second it appeared on my screen I had no idea existed. Today I registered for BlogU, a weekend conference for women, moms, bloggers, and writers that will take place in Baltimore in June. I clicked on the ad, saw that the conference was being hosted by a few successful, female bloggers on sites I recognized (like Scary Mommy), checked out the seminar topics, noticed that there was an option for a “single room” that was rapidly selling out, jumped the gun, and bought myself a seat at the table. Just like that.

After I’d received my emailed confirmation, though, the panic set in. What the hell are you thinking? You are going to have to TALK to other women now. In real life. For three days. Women you have never met before. Women who are probably better writers than you will ever be. The doubt began to seep in. Suspecting the insidious negativity demon was planning an all-out mental assault, I quickly pulled up the site for United Airlines, logged into my account, and booked a round-trip flight to Baltimore for the first weekend in June. Boom! 

I sat back and stared at the confirmation on my screen, simultaneously dumbfounded and impressed, cycling between abject terror and confident detachment. My whole impulsive display of bravado boiled down to a quote by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: “Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.” It doesn’t get much bolder for a confidence-challenged, fledgling blogger than registering for a conference for writers. It first requires a belief that you deserve to be in that company of writers.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend asked me what career I would want if I could choose to begin it tomorrow. And, for the first time ever, my ideal job description was easy to articulate: I want to write what I want and make money doing it. Now, I don’t live under a rock. I know this is the dream of every poor and frustrated writer on the planet and probably some in outer space too if we are, as I suspect, not entirely alone. Still, I’ve wanted this ever since I was a girl and I stumbled upon a copy of Erma Bombeck’s The Grass is Always Greener over the Septic Tank. As I perused the pages of that book back in my grandmother’s bathroom in Buffalo, New York, I realized that there was a woman out there who was being paid to write her mind. I tucked that knowledge away in the deep crevasses in my brain. A couple of weeks ago it bubbled to the surface and skittered its way out of my mouth before I had the chance to swallow it with good sense again.

Truth is that I’m tired of the self-doubt. I’m tired of the second guessing, the pooh-poohing, the maybe-somedaying. I’m not the best writer on the planet, but I’m not the worst either. Yes. Anyone can write. And it seems that anyone and everyone does. We all have a forum these days. But, there is a time to make an investment in your dream and to have faith in yourself…or at least to be willing to research the possibility of it. I’ve reached that point. And I have a few months to work with my therapist on developing self-confidence or at least the bullshit skills to fake-it-until-you-make-it. I’m hoping that in four months’ time I’ll be able to converse in person with other writers. Maybe even without having to consume a half of a bottle of wine first.